KEY POINTS:
Australian writer Luke Davies has just been through one of the hardest years of his life.
For someone who lost a decade, in his 20s, to heroin addiction, that's saying something. A year ago, the Sydney-based writer, best known here for his mesmerising novel Candy, about a
young couple in the grip of extreme addiction, decided to move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend.
Davies wanted to live in LA so he could pursue a career as a script-writer, a skill he'd already admirably demonstrated in the 2006 screen adaptation of Candy, starring the late Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish as the lovers.
His life packed up in boxes, all set to go, Davies' plans went askew when his girlfriend told him it was over. People with addiction problems too often slip back to the pattern of blocking emotional pain with drugs and/or alcohol.
Davies, clean of both since going to rehab in 1990, toughed it out and went to LA on his own.
It was a true test of inner strength, a subject he brings up without prompting. "It's been a very, very difficult year," says the 45-year-old on the phone from Sydney, where he has returned to promote his new novel, God Of Speed.
"My life was all going in one direction. I'd been in this relationship for six years and it ended really suddenly. It wasn't my choice. We were going to LA together, it was like a big adventure. So that changed everything. I thought, 'I'm going to go anyway'.
It was like arriving in a new, very bewildering and enormous city without the buffer zone of a co-adventure with a lover. "But the good thing about this is it's kind of proof you can get to a stage of your life where you are able to experience difficult times with a kind of grace.
It's okay sometimes to go through turbulence, you don't have to flee from it or panic. I've been lost and lonely - it's been difficult, but I wouldn't swap a moment of it.
It's been like this sense of, 'Luke, it's okay'." With what he describes as "the generosity of a tiny circle of friends" in LA, Davies got an agent, which took two months, then a work visa, which took three.
He was all set to start the "pitch" - "it's all about the pitch, learning the weirdness of walking into a room and trying to say this is what I would do with your novel" - when the four-month-long writers' strike started in Hollywood. So Davies completed God Of Speed instead, about the great aviator-turned-eccentric Howard Hughes, a monologue from the billionaire's drug-addled, twisted perspective towards the end of his isolated life, holed up in a London hotel with Mormon minders.
Davies first started writing God Of Speed in 1994, when he penned a disturbing chapter which remains in the book today, depicting Hughes' state of mind during a solo flight in 1937.
Hughes, drugged out of his head, believes he is soaring with the "goddess of night" and expresses his whacked-out sense of connection with "her" with a sexual act while cutting the engines, heightening his own sense of power as the aircraft plunges towards the Pacific Ocean.
"That chapter was the seed of the book," explains Davies.
"There was something about that which attracted me so much to get into the heart of this completely lost person and try to bring to life his most intimate and mad moment, that sense of yearning for a sexual 'lost-ness' that he strove for in completely compulsive ways.
"In a sense he was completely misogynistic. He used and discarded women, so that scene contains all of the tragedy and pathos of his life.
It's about the deep desire he had for a kind of spiritual connection which is possible in intimate relationships between the sexes but which he never found because he became so distorted, he wasn't able to connect."
Davies wrote one more chapter for the book, about Hughes' fifth serious crash, in suburban Beverly Hills in 1946, a crash which saw the beginning of his lifelong addiction to hardcore painkillers, and then the idea for Candy came to him.
"For various reasons it became apparent to me that Candy would be the book I wrote first. It came at the same time when I was about four years out of my own history of addiction and the fog was beginning to lift."
Candy was published in 1997, and Davies was named Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year in 1998. He is also an accomplished poet, winning various awards for his collections Four Plots for Magnets, Absolute Event Horizon, Running With Light and Totem, which won the Melbourne Age Book of the Year Award in 2004.
When he returned to writing God Of Speed, "it got really interesting because this librarian I know gave me a password for the Times' digital archive which gives you access to a whole bunch of American newspapers and [others] from around the world since the late 1800s.
Once I started going into the primary sources, it was so easy. I could find every single article that ever mentioned Howard Hughes in the New York Times and the LA Times.
At that point you started to see what the world thought of him as he was doing all that [aviation] stuff and you saw the adulation that America at large had for him in the 1930s when he was at the peak of his glory.
"He was genuinely loved as a guy who overcame what Americans saw as the obstacle of inherited wealth. The obstacle was that that would soften your character and Hughes rose above that.
He found a way of being a hero that was genuinely valid, the breaking of the records, the striving to create new technology. Whereas sitting on your laurels and living on Daddy's money in America is almost seen as something to be frowned upon."
The book's structure, short-burst chapters, is Davies' way of mirroring Hughes' mental state as he looks back at his life, importantly going back to his childhood and his relationship with his over-protective mother.
"It was like form met function," he says. "It made sense that his attention span was so scrambled, he was so all over the shop, jumping around. In terms of the narrative, there was so much that could get bogged down in his ugliness, so the short chapters were a nice way to keep it bouncing along."
Chillingly, the chapters are occasionally interrupted by the reproduction of verbatim extracts from memos written by Hughes to his staff.
One, written in 1959, "on retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet", reveals an obsession with cleanliness gone mad, opening with, "first, use six or eight thicknesses of Kleenex pulled one at a time from the slot in touching the doorknob to open the door to the bathroom."
By the time the cord has been extracted from the cabinet, dozens of Kleenexes will be used, per instructions, then discarded. "These memos were like a gift from the gods," exclaims Davies. "It was this opportunity to insert these weird slices of reality into this fictionalised book. I couldn't have tried to imitate that style of language because it is so insane. The prose style is so obsessive it becomes unbearable.
"I was trying to almost capture this idealised interior poetry of the sort of drug-tranced state of Hughes' inner thoughts in the rest of the book, not this external prose style that was making its way on to those memos.
"It was fantastic to have them in the book, they give this really clear insight into the depth of the insanity, how brutal the madness was."
In Candy, the junkies' daily routine is driven by the endless search for money to buy drugs. In God of Speed, Hughes' addiction presents no material problem as far as having money to support his habit.
"I was really interested in exploring the notion of what addiction would have felt like if you were completely unhindered by obstacles. But that was Hughes' tragedy, there was no one ever to tell him his behaviour was loopy because he was surrounded by enablers."
Most people who have seen Candy the film will agree it was one of Heath Ledger's finest pieces of work, and Davies - who appeared in the movie as a cheery milkman - acknowledges it "was a tremendously brave performance".
"One hesitates to hurl the word tragedy around lightly but his death really was a tragedy. It's the loss of someone who was genuinely generous and spirited in his intimate life which was what made him, in a weird way, great on screen. That's what made people feel his loss so personally, the quality that made him great on screen was the quality that made you feel you knew this guy when you watched what he did."
* God of Speed (Allen & Unwin $37.99).Luke Davies is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 14-18.
